Tim Berners-Lee in the New Scientist

I was reading the New Scientist over the weekend, and came across this interview with Tim Berners-Lee. [My apologies, but unless you have a subscription the magazine won’t let you get past the article stub].

I’ll paraphrase what the interview said; any and all errors and misinterpretations are mine and mine alone. Where I have quoted directly from the article, this has been made clear.

Web was about putting documents and images online; semantic web is about putting data online.

We can publish articles and papers now, but not the underlying data. We need the data.

To publish this data we need a mark-up language for data. So we created RDF.

RDF lets you put data on the web and make connections so we have one big database.

When we free this data magical things can and will happen.

Some get the power of this; many don’t; the life sciences guys are good at getting it.

Privacy and data protection are issues, but nowhere near as much as people make out

Web did not fulfil potential for showing the “how”, stayed on the “what”

As HTML became a truly powerful presentation medium, looking improved and editing died

Blogs and wikis are helping change that, though we have much to learn about social software

“We have to learn about how people like to make groups and learn about the social systems involved in collaborations as well as the technical side of things”

“The internet was designed not to care what was done with it. It just moved packets of information from one place to another: the fundamental properties that make the internet work could not be held to ransom”

“The internet is all about division between layers”

“The web tries not to prefer one sort of information over another”

“The web needs to be the way it is to work”

“Before the web, and even now, a lot of the systems were being designed to be completely consistent. The way we’ve traditionally done that is to make top-down hierarchical systems, whether in organisations or in programming. This has always been considered a good thing. The maxims of top-down, structured programming are “information-hiding” so that modules don’t see into each other but are black boxes tied together at the edges.

“The maxim of the web, however, is if you have something important, give it a label and then people will link to it.

“….by trying to constrain ourselves to use hierarchical systems, we’ve reached the limit of scale”